Electronic devices are being designed and fabricated with ever-increasing levels of integration and complexity. For instance, system-on-chip (SoC) devices may contain entire computing systems, including digital, analog, mixed-signal, and radio-communications circuitry, all on a single semiconductor substrate. Today's applications for these highly-integrated devices call for high-performance computing, high-capacity data storage, diverse modes of communication, high-resolution graphics processing. At the same time, such advanced functionality is being designed into compact device form factors, such as watches, eyeglasses, implantable medical devices, Internet of Things (IoT) modules to be unobtrusively incorporated into host devices, and countless other end-user applications. Accordingly, IC designers face a number of trade-offs between such factors as functionality, performance, die size, end-product space constraints, manufacturability, reliability, and cost, among a host of other factors.
Reliability of a manufactured end product may be affected by manufacturability of the component parts. For example, in the case of large ICs, the soldered connections of the IC to a printed circuit board (PCB) may be subject to substantial stresses as a result of thermal effects experienced by the parts during assembly. Over time, these stresses may lead to electrical contact failure, which may lead to the failure of the end product, resulting in warranty claims, product recalls and, at worst, safety-related risks when the end product happens to be a mission-critical system or critical component of such a system.
Solutions are needed to address these, and other, considerations in the design of integrated circuits and their packaging.